Later than expected....

Thursday 31st July

I guess I have to make some sort of apology that I haven’t made any contribution on a little while. I could say that I was far too busy, which would in some part be true, however I would be lying if I said it was a case of all work and no play makes James a dull boy. Well going back in time to try and remember what happened over the last two weeks is a little tricky; I can remember some of it, but not all!

I think the week after I last sent an update, I had a bit of trouble with the assignments which are part of the CELTA, you have four to complete and you must pass at least three of the four set. At the end of week 3, I was pulled aside and given another chance to complete a couple of the assignments, but was failed on one of them! I was pretty shocked at that to be honest. I came into this thinking that because I do so much writing, that this would be my strongest part. Not to be! In truth, a lot of people were struggling with some of the assignments. I basically got given the “we are not going to let you fail” wink, and was told to work on it over the weekend and let the tutors read through anything I had done before I handed it in as a re-submission. Still at the end of Friday on the third week (which for my teaching, was a very good week), it was a bit of a blow to the old system.

I compensated by getting absolutely smashed! The awesome foursome (Jez, Konrad, Mike and myself), went to the cinema to see the new Batman film (I thought it was pretty good, Heath Ledger nailed it). The film finished at about 11pm, it was the start of Buddhist Lent which is marked with a festival. This means that alcohol sales are prohibited and many of the bars are closed. However, being Bangkok, the land where anything is possible, we went back to Jez’ apartment, got a big bottle of Thai whisky, and proceeded to smoke and drink into the wee hours, but not before getting another bottle and seeing that one out as well. By that point we were all getting a little bit of cabin fever, so we did the only noble thing. Release ourselves onto the unsuspecting streets of Bangkok! As usual you can get into a club if you pay the right money, and we did. I can’t really remember that much more.... I know I was absolutely trashed and that standing was a problem, let alone dancing I remember that we stayed at this club until it closed and then we went to another around the corner – more like a small bar. We had a very expensive beer there, and then left to go the other bar next door which was a pool room. After that I was really feeling the pain, somehow I thought it was g great necessity for me to withdraw 5000 Baht of which I lent a friend 1000. Luckily I did see some sense at that point and got myself into a taxi home. I think the combination of broad daylight and extreme alcohol abuse coupled with the fact that I had been stood in this bar for 20 painful minutes without getting a game of pool which finally tipped me back into sanity. I staggered home from the taxi and woke up a good few hours later... I never could remember buying all the fried chicken and rice that was sat in a bag in my room when I came too, however it made for a suitably filthy first meal of the day.

I think that was the beginning and end of that weekend. I unsurprisingly ran out of steam and just concentrated on rehydration and other recovery methods. Sunday was dedicated to lesson planning, and rewriting the parts of my assignments which needed attention. Monday was pretty liberal, I handed in my assignments to get pass marks all around and I prepared to teach my first of two one hour lessons on Tuesday. After putting in a lot of effort for that lesson, Tuesday came around and I had looked after my mind and body enough to deliver an absolute belter of a lesson which really put me in a good mood, I had officially bounced back from my Friday slump. In fact I was so happy with it, I decided, along with my friend Jez who also taught his penultimate lesson that day, that we would go out to celebrate. Mid-week celebrations on the last week of your CELTA? Good idea/bad idea??? Well, it was of course a great idea! We went out to Kao San Road and drank up in a bar aptly named Hippie Bar. After a few drinks and some lightning paced silver tongued chatting, we decided to take it further. Luckily for us, we had been grooving on the slick reggae vibes which Hippie Bar had been feeding us (intermittently with sips and slugs of beer), which led our finely tuned senses of party direction up a side street and into a Ska club. YES! This place was great! Strangely enough, although it was just off the main Kao San road area, which is infamously littered with backpackers and everything that follows, we were the only foreigners here in what was a largely university crowd. The music was very good – a live Thai ska band who we gather are pretty famous in Thailand. We soon got into it to the point of evocative dancing (come on, I know you have all seen me do it!). Because of that it wasn’t too long before jez and I were befriended to the point of celebrity status by a horde of young Thai University guys with broken English, delighted at the fact that we were totally into it. They manically introduced themselves and all of their friends for a good while, and we danced and had a really good night until about 2am when the lights came on and things started to slow down. We then had to pose for easily 20 group pictures with them all, each taking turn to use a different camera of course! We said our goodbyes, still on the high from all of this, but getting to a point of high drunkenness; Jez and James got dangerous and jumped into a taxi to take us for free to one of Bangkok’s more notorious after hour’s party spots – Spicy!

Well sometimes it has to happen. Actually Spicy is not so terrible (yes it is!). It is a big club, supposedly owned by the military police, or at least they have some deal going on. Most clubs and bars have to close by 2am in Bangkok, as of June, only some have a special ‘licence’ or agreement with the police. So this club, is much more of a club than a bar girl ranch. I say that because if you ever go into a more organised place where you are pretty much there to pay money for company, you will understand why I say ranch – I’m talking 40 scantily clad girls sat in a semi-circle looking pretty bored whilst mostly western punters go from drunk to far too drunk before they find a suitor... hmmm..... All the money at those places go to the taxi drivers, the bar and the pimp (who is usually some old guy who takes no shit). Spicy, however, still with the potential for darkness is a little less controlled. There are no bargirls, however there is a no Thai men policy – except for the exception of workers and taxi drivers. So the clientèle is comprised of westerners and women who either want to meet western men or get something from them. The club then is pretty big and standard in terms of a club in the UK. Banging Hip-Hop fresh from Jay-Z’s gob and because of the 300 B entry, you get a free drink. Jez and I had the foresight to go to the local 7-11 and stash a stock of beers in our socks (John Wayne style, because of the resulting walk). On entrance we had our beers and did a couple of laps of the joint. Making the interesting observation that the far right corner seemed to be where all the black guys were, and the diagonal opposite being where all the ladyboys were hanging out... near the toilets of course. We then decided it would be our game to order some gin and tonics and follow that up with a tour of all of the note worthy tables and take it in turn to introduce ourselves and then dazzle the inhabitants with a magic trick or two. This magic trick let me say is pretty impressive, I won’t give away the details but it does involve a vanishing and reappearing hanky-chief and a prosthetic thumb. I will leave the rest up for your imagination. But needless to say it got a few wows and even more applause; I think most of the women in there are used to a lot less. After a while we came upon four girls who were impressed, but also smart enough to work out the trick and then proceed to copy it to great success first time around. Needless to say, it was then us who were the impressed ones. We went to a table, had some drinks and then said our goodbyes. It was 5am and Jez and I knew that tomorrow we would be eating a big slice of struggle pie as we had to be at school early, but not that early!

So.... Wednesday... Lucky for us we had a late start because it was the submission date for our final assignment – don’t worry, no fails this time, not for anyone, as it was a self evaluation. We all know that James Pappas cannot fail when he has to talk about himself...Because of the late start, a good fruit breakfast and plenty of Super Gurana, I wasn’t too shaky until the end of the day, which after an hour of lesson planning, and hour lunch and then 2 hours of lesson observation followed by another hour of teaching feedback (please read that this means I had to do nothing for 5 hours – when I could so easily have been sleeping), I was pretty dead, and I still had to go home and plan my final lesson! That was hard; I was having to twitch myself back to being awake for the last 3 hours and my students, who even though I wasn’t teaching, thought I was in a really weird/bad mood, which in hindsight was actually pretty funny. I decided I would go home and sleep for a couple of hours before getting up to burn some midnight oil.

Not to be, I made my decision just before I went home as to what I would teach made all the relevant photocopies and went home. I knew that this would be a tough lesson for me personally, because I had to deal with a grammar point in some detail. I chose direct and reported speech, which in hindsight probably saved my ass, firstly because it was easy and secondly because I had some good resources on it which meant that I could adapt enough of it to make for a good lesson. Thursday came, and a good lesson it was! WORD! I succeeded without a problem, nailed the last nail into the lesson coffin and passed with flying colours, even though I thought some of my hardcore grammar explanations went off on a bit of a tangent, luckily, my students were great and they knew their stuff which made all the difference. So everything was done, all I had to do was turn up for the last day! Sweet-deal.

The last day was of course a total formality; we spent it doing bits of admin and paperwork to make everything official,. In the afternoon, we had the students for an hour, and we just spoke informally to them, and then the last hour was a party where they brought in loads of food and took more photographs and gave some presents. I was on a bit of a euphoric high, and got a bit giddy, because I get on with all the students really well they all wanted to swap emails, phone numbers etc. I was in a pretty popular position and it was really difficult to divide my time between everyone. I was pretty much swamped for most of the time... but I kind of loved the attention. I think the other teachers and trainers and secretaries were surprised to see how much they all liked me as well. But, to be fair, it wasn’t for show, I felt the same about all of my students and it was nice to have that time with them. Since then I have kept in contact and been taken out to various places which I will describe later.

After the ‘party’ we took the trainers, along with all the Indian guys out for some drinks (which I’m really glad about because they were so nice and we didn’t have much opportunity outside of the course to do anything together – we all thought they might try to make a sharp cheeky exit because we were going to drink!). We went to a local bar – Irish in nature, but we soon multi-culturalised that, drank some wine, said some speeches, and had time to get a little emotional. The Indian crew left and said their fair-wells which was really touching (they left the next day), but not before being cheeky enough to pick up the tabs! After a couple of hours, we all started to go our separate ways, of course Mike, Jez, Konrad and I would be meeting up a little later for some more hedonistic debauchery. I went home and had a meal with Es before she went back to work, and then I met up with everyone in good old Kao San, but in a slightly more staggered fashion than first planned. Jez got a swanky postal invite to the birthday party for V-Channel, with no expense spared, whilst Mike came to my apartment where we rocked out some Ska and drank Whisky, after an hour the rain came and we endured a massive lightning storm which was right above our heads and staying there for quite some time. I have never seen red lightning before, or heard the sound which is made when lightning attacks your apartment, but it did, and it killed all the power in the area for a good couple of hours. Luckily my laptop has battery max X2 and we enjoyed the benefit of both light and music. We ran out of ice and went to my wonderful 24hour shop downstairs and when we reached the foyer of my apartment we realised that there was a kind of New York blackout homage scene going down. All the people from the club next door and the residents of the apartments were chatting in a really friendly way, the shop was candle lit and had a really nostalgic atmosphere about it, people buying candles, ice, beer and whisky, talking and laughing. It was really nice and cosy. After the power came back on, we remembered wat we were doing, Jez called us to say that he had arrived at Kao San,m and we decided to make tracks to join him for the night ahead.

In true fashion, it went from drunk, to good, to very drunk, to alarmingly dangerous in terms of morality. Jez made an early exit with some posh Thai girl he had met a few times before. We were trying to teach her the dynamics of patrois and she was telling us how much she wished she was a whore, at that point I went into psychoanalyse this crazy girl mode and messed with her head a little, which is always amusing. When Jez left, Konrad AKA Konradical AKA the Modal Gangsta turned up as a worthy replacement and we picked up the party. We got one of the filthy free tuk tuks which tuk (excuse the pun) us past three of the grimiest bars in BKK, which were all closed (shut down by the police), we ended up somewhere I have never been before, nor want to go again (I have to add at this point I was recently taken to this place again, once I realised where I was, I left pretty sharpish!). Oh dear! So to control the situation, we blew large amounts of thai baht on Whisky, ice and soda and proceeded to nail it. We got talking to some weird Australian dude who looked more like a Hells Angel, and then to a few Thai women. Unfortunately this was one of those places where there were 40 or so bargirls sat in the horseshoe being called over. After a while Konrad went home to his girlfriend (luckily for him, before Evil Konrad came out) leaving only Mike and myself, who at this point were beyond redemption. No comment, all I can say is that it was all Mikes fault....

Thirty six hours later.... I had recovered suitably and I tried to restore everything to normality. I had arranged to go to a market in the north of the city in a place called Chatuchak, about 6 stops on the subway from me. However, thanks to Jez’s wonderful sense of direction I ended up doing a massive circle around the whole of Bangkok using every kind of transport except a boat. 1 ½ hours, and 240 Baht later I completed what is actually a 15 minute subway journey which costs 31 Baht! Oh well, you live and learn! Chatuchak hosts the world’s largest outside market. It is a Weekend market, however it does have stalls during the week which specialise in different things. For example Tuesday is garden furniture, plants and outside decorations day. But during the weekend everything is open, the place is filled with thousands of shops, and Thais and Falangs to boot. I had arranged to meet a student of mine Paw, who was kind enough to put up with me and show me around. The place is amazing, too big to fully comprehend on one visit – in fact I couldn’t even buy anything that time around, I just wanted to explore it, get the low down on some good shops and get my bearings. The place is divided into about 24 sections with about 8-10 other secret sections and is also joined by an inside market and several other neighbouring markets, which makes it impossible to cover in
one day. It gets astonishingly hot, but it is totally worth it. There is a motto for the market, and that is that you can actually buy anything you could ever want, and I don’t doubt this, the trouble lies in that it has much more of the stuff that you don’t want! If it try to give you an idea of some of the things I have seen here then I would include – lots of independent clothes shops run my Young Thai entrepreneurs (in fact all Thai’s are intrinsically entrepreneurs), but these clothes are custom, like no other and cheap as fuck to put it quaintly! I found an amazing jewellery/clothes shop which is run by a couple of nice guys who I got talking to. Food is a plenty here, it is always a plenty in Bangkok, but here you can really graze to good effect all day long, but you have to stay light on your toes to negotiate the masses through the tiny market corridors. So, music, dvd’s, computer software, hardware, clothes, new/custom and second hand (an incredible selection of old-school good quality trainers, like early air max etc.), animals – yes that’s right, you can snag yourself some of the cutest balls of fur ever here, fish, cats, dogs and bunny rabbits are the main attractions (believe me I nearly came home with a cat twice!), but I also understand that there is a massive trade in illegal wildlife such as monkeys, various exotic birds, Japanese fighting fish, snakes and lizards. Plants, handmade furniture, musical instruments (Iput your orders in guys!), all the nik-naks (I don’t mean the crisps – but I guess you can buy them too if you really want), trinkets, amulets, herbal tonics, dried fish, memorabilia... bla..bla...bla too much for me to continue.

But it is a really unique experience and after 5 or 6 hours it is also really tiring, but worth it! Along the way out of all the people we also managed to bump into one of my teacher trainers which was pretty random, poor old Barry, I don’t think he quite knew what to make of the situation. To be fair, it was the last place in Bangkok I would think to see him soon as he has such a reclusive manner and an obvious dislike of large crowds, I don’t really know what he thought about me being there with one of the more attractive female students, but hey... I am not a teacher there anymore! Well he did drop his coconut (no euphemism intended) at the sight of us, but to my mild disappointment he was not accompanied by his 18 year old Thai boyfriend. I received a phone call from Konrad who was on his way (also taking instruction from Jez, which was another bad idea for him! As I was saying my goodbyes to Paw, we were just discussing the best way for me to meet Konrad when he walked straight into us, for such a big market the chances of just bumping into people you know becomes massive! I joined Konrad and his girlfriend on a hunt for the perfect guitar which was swiftly abandoned in favour of a return to Kao San for drinks. And drinks we did have.

In Thailand, there is this unique way of sharing a cocktail. Bucket form. You can order a bucket full of something (we drank Caphurenias – sorry the spelling is wrong, you know what I mean though the old white rum, lime and soda with sugar syrup). We killed off about 3 or 4 before we moved to another bar which was really nice. There was a guy with a really nice voice playing his guitar and offering people to come and accompany him. We had another 2 or 3 buckets of death and by this point we were getting pretty drunk and it was also getting pretty late! Konrads girlfriend retired and we had a few more... I think we went to another bar, I can’t remember. All u do remember is that we were talking to some English/Americans and Canadians when all of a sudden I turned around and Evil Konrad had appeared. I should point out at this stage that Konrad and evil Konrad are the same human being, but not the same person. In fact Evil is a bit of a pushover, but he is self-destructive if ever there was such a thing! I did the wise thing and took him home before it got too bad – I say bad, this was the first and only time I actually came face to face with the force that is, and for me at the time it was more funny than anything else... I had half a mind to buy him another drink and egg him on to see how far he would go. After Konrad went home I decided the same punishment was in order for me! But, when I looked in my pockets I didn’t really find anything that exciting. I tried to use my bankcard and I couldn’t get anything out. At that point I freaked out a little bit, thinking I had no money in the world and for a moment the danger of that hit home somewhat. I sat in a gutter with the roaches trying to count the change in my pocket for an hour and a half, getting different results each time – partly because every time I counted I ended up dropping more and more! Eventually I decided to just get a taxi, what’s the worst that could happen! Luckily, I had exactly the amount needed - 71 Baht and when I got back, I was sober enough to conduct a test into whether or not I could take money out of a different bank. Success, smile restored! This was actually the last time I saw Konrad, we have had some facebook contact and some SMS, but now silence. I think he must have gone to Laos or Vietnam, but I know I will see him again sometime.

The next day, Monday I think, I met Mike on Silom Road, our backyard, where it seems we grew up because it is where our school was. We popped in to say hello, check if our results were in yet and then went for a meal. We then decided to do something relaxing and tourist like, so what better than go to Ocean World! Located in the Basement levels of the massive and uber-pretentious quarters of the Siam Centre, Ocean World as you can probably guess is a massive marine life centre. All the freaky animals of the deep you could ever want. Mike was kind enough to subsidise my entry (thanks Mike), and we spent 2-3 hours taking pictures of ugly fish and trying to provoke a reaction from sharks, otters and shrimps (actually I really had a craving to eat the shrimps!), there were also the biggest fucking crabs I have ever seen – 4 meter spans if you take into account the legs. These dudes were about as freaky as you can get! Massive Sting rays and Manta Rays, Tiger Sharks and a section devoted to Rainforest fish and what-nott-ery, all of which was thoroughly interesting. There is even a fish which is harmless to humans, but eats piranha, that I did not know, but what a good egg he is! After all this we stopped for a swanky coffee in some weird Euro-Thai food fusion place, which actually made me really want to eat but the price was more costly that that I paid the other night (the one we don’t talk about...). After this, Mike persuaded me to get on mission to buy a wedding card for his Brother and locate all the necessary things such as stamps, post-boxes and the like, it takes longer than you think when you are in a part of town which has more Armarni, Hugo Boss and Versace outlets than 7/11’s, but wouldn’t you know it, sure enough there is a Hallmark. Fucking Americans! But in retrospect, job done!

The rest of this week was a complete white wash, nothing of interest I don’t think. I’m sure I went out once, but apart from that I just looked for work, polished up my C.V. and tried to keep a low profile! I think towards the end of the week I started writing this update, and now I find myself a week on! I went with Es to one of her offices on the RCA which also happened to be the home of the Thai Federation for Filmmakers, the Critics Association and the organisers of the Bangkok International Film Festival. James pulled up his charm socks and while Es went to work, I did some smooth talking starting with the secretaries and working my way up. I hassled them all until they went for lunch, and I left them with my C.V. and exchanged contact details, and registered for delegate privileges. Since then, they are still considering a position for me to work with them on their team programming or event coordinating. Either way, it is a sweet deal and I am assured of a free pass! After that Es took me to Thaicom – the site for Thailand’s first and only public (i.e. non military) communications satellite receiver. This operates on many levels, but Es works here in one of the many master control rooms for a Thai film company. Really strange place, but nice people. I got my special ‘customer’ pass which is valid for a year, so theoretically I can just wander in whenever I want now without suspicion, I could take over Thailand from this place... probably... any ideas?

Come the weekend, Mike’s friend Adam arrived to come and stay for three months or so. A really nice guy, we met for drinks in Kao San, shot some pool and met some thoroughly nice eggs from all over the world, one guy, James from Canada, was especially interesting and we were lucky enough to bump into him the next night as well. Both nights we spent a lot of time at this little backstreet Reggae bar, where I was offered some weed, but declined through peer paranoia. I was up for it, except the price, but Mike applied enough pressure to stop me, so I caved in. If it was me though, I would have done it just before I left, but you can never be too sure with the motives here, some people get money in their back pocket for getting farangs imprisoned, so yeah in hindsight, it is probably only a good idea to source herb from islands or trusted sources. So far so good, I’m about to start my 7th week here and still no weed for James.

Hmmmm.... this week, what happened, ah! well, Mike and Adam went to Laos for 3 weeks on a long winded VISA run, whilst I stayed here to source some extra work.
I met up with another student, Mei and her friend, Am. Mei is a really nice girl who is a freelance journalist, she sent me such a nice email last week, I had to reply and we have been in good contact since. She was always so quiet in class, but now I have met her, she actually has a very good command of English. She took me to an art exhibition in Siam Square. In fact it was the opening exhibition of this gallery, a really amazing new building and the opening exhibition was a photographic one which hosted pictures by one of the Kings daughters, who like her father shares and has a very keen eye for photography. The exhibition spanned about 3 years of documentary footage of her travels around the world, including some really stunning pictures which were witty, sensitive, interesting and humanitarian. I really enjoyed it and I gained a new respect for the royal family here, I also learned a lot more about Bangkok and Thailand. Two days later, they took me to the Siam Discovery Museum, which is an interactive version of what would be a national history museum. We started by meeting at the south end of the river Chao Phrara which is main waterway (and perhaps the life and soul of this city – the world’s most busy waterway), we travelled up to one of the peers further north and got off at the flower market, which opens at night until 4am every day! West of the river is the site of the most recent previous capital of Thailand and on the east the main hub itself. After all this I greatly expended my knowledge of Bangkok, Thailand’s history and geography. I also learned how to use the buses, which are now (un-air-conditioned ones only) free for six months! Likewise the 3rd class trains all over Thailand are now operating on the same basis in an effort to cut the amount of traffic on the roads.
In the evenings I caught up with Jez a bit this week and we went out with lots of other teachers a couple of times which was really nice. One of the guys who works at IH, Ollie is a good egg, who has been here 2 years and is going home in a month, his command of Thai is very good and I learned a great deal from him so far, we went out a couple of nights on the spin and now I’m feeling the effects of those 8am bedtimes! Today I just bought a computer game and stayed in most of the day and ate junk food. 200 Baht for a new PC game! All the outlets seem to be allowed to sell copied software, not just games, but top end software, for anything between 50 and 200 Baht a pop! So people, if you want to get hold of something in particular, let me know... 200 Baht is £3.10! I also have a friend at a DVD shop who sells me DVD’s for half price... 50 Baht... about 80p! This country is made of sweet magic! I am starting to get cabin fever now though, it is 12:20am and I have been drinking a litre of Thai whiskey mixed with a little cola and a lot of soda and ice... I’m starting to get cabin fever, so I think I am going to venture out to see what happens.... wish me luck! I will let you know what happens next time.... I think it could be spectacular!